Looking for a Pdfcrowd alternative? Here's an honest comparison. Pdfcrowd is a long-running HTML to PDF API (since 2009) with official SDKs in seven languages and many other conversions, sold as monthly plans where credits depend on output size. Shotmint renders PDFs from a URL or raw HTML with headless Chromium, and also does screenshots and Open Graph images, paid per render with prepaid credits and no monthly plan.
| Model | Price | Free tier | Unused volume | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pdfcrowd | Monthly subscription; 1 credit per 0.5 MB of output | Nano $1/mo for 10 · Micro $11/mo for 200 · Small $23/mo for 1,000 · Medium $35/mo for 5,000 · Large $61/mo for 10,000 · Ultimate $106/mo for 20,000 · Enterprise from $221/mo for 50,000 | Trial: 100 test credits for one month | Credits refresh each billing period |
| Shotmint | Prepaid credits, no subscription | €5 / 2,000 · €19 / 10,000 · €59 / 50,000 (one-time) | 25 free renders a month, no signup | Never expire |
Pdfcrowd prices are in USD and come from their public pricing page on 21 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.
Pdfcrowd has been around since 2009 and covers much more than HTML to PDF: HTML to image, PDF to HTML, PDF to text, PDF to image, image to PDF, merging and page extraction as an API, and an invoice API that builds PDFs from structured data. Its PDF output can carry watermarks and passwords and can be PDF/A or tagged PDF. It has official SDKs for PHP, Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, Ruby and Go, a command-line client, a WordPress plugin, a "save this page as PDF" button for your visitors, and Zapier and Make integrations. If you need PDF-to-HTML or a ready-made WordPress plugin, Pdfcrowd is the better fit. Its Nano plan ($1 a month for 10) is also hard to beat for a handful of documents.
Your volume is irregular, your PDFs can be large (image-heavy reports use several Pdfcrowd credits each), or you also need screenshots. 1,000 PDFs a month cost $276 a year on Pdfcrowd Small against €24 a year on Shotmint, and 10,000 a month cost $732 a year on Large against about €156. Shotmint counts one credit per document whatever its size or page count, and credits never expire, so a quiet month costs nothing. POST /v1/pdf takes a URL or raw HTML with A3/A4/A5/Letter/Legal/Tabloid, landscape, margins, scale, backgrounds, header and footer templates and page numbers, rendered by headless Chromium, so flexbox, grid, web fonts and JavaScript charts come out as Chrome shows them. The same credits cover PNG/JPEG/WebP screenshots and 1200×630 Open Graph cards, failed renders are free, and a free key with 25 renders a month takes one request, with no signup. We have no document conversions in the API (PDF/A output, AES-256 passwords and print/copy/edit limits are supported) (our free protect PDF and watermark PDF tools run in the browser).
GET /v1/screenshot: PNG, JPEG or WebP screenshots of any URL, with full-page capture, custom viewport, retina scale, a single-element selector, dark mode, transparent backgrounds (omit_background), ad and cookie-banner blocking (block_ads), and hide_selectors.POST /v1/pdf: PDFs from a URL or raw HTML, with format, landscape, margins, backgrounds, header and footer templates, and page numbers.GET /v1/content: the main content of any page or PDF link as Markdown, plain text or clean HTML, with title, author and date, for LLMs and RAG.GET /v1/og: 1200×630 Open Graph cards from a title and subtitle, with signed public URLs you can put straight in an og:image tag.X-Credits-Remaining header.Shotmint is a new, small service. It has small Node and Python SDKs and integration guides, but no enterprise plans, SLA or team accounts yet (measured uptime and render times are public on /status). If you need those, Pdfcrowd may suit you better. If you want an API key in 10 seconds and to pay only for what you use, try it.
ScreenshotOne, Urlbox, PDFShift, ApiFlash, PagePixels, ScreenshotAPI.net, HTML/CSS to Image, Microlink, Screenshot Machine, Screenshotlayer, Bannerbear, Placid, Browshot, Restpack, ScrapingBee, DocRaptor, pdflayer, html2pdf.app, Browserless, PDFMonkey, Doppio, CaptureKit, APITemplate.io, url2png, Firecrawl, CraftMyPDF, IronPDF, SelectPdf, Prince, Aspose.HTML, EvoPdf, PDF.co, CloudConvert, pdfEndpoint, Abstract Screenshot API, GrabzIt. Yearly cost at three volumes: screenshot API pricing and HTML to PDF API pricing.
No signup, no card; the free key refills on the 1st of every month. If you need more, buy credits once: €5 for 2,000, €19 for 10,000, €59 for 50,000. They never expire, and they stack on top of the 25 free renders a month, which every key keeps. From a script, an AI agent, Make or Zapier, POST /v1/keys/free (no body) returns a key as JSON (openapi.json, no-code recipes).